Anyone Seen My Ball?

Yesterday I ended my post about the “dust up” at the State Board of Education meeting over the appointments to the new Public Charter School Commission with “stay tuned for further developments.”

Well we didn’t have to wait long as a bill was introduced today (May 14) by Rep. Terri Collins of Decatur that would eliminate the State Board from the selection process. Rather than having the Governor, Lt. Governor, Senate Pro Tem and Speaker of the House submit names to the board to pick half of them to serve, she is proposing that these four officials simply make appointments and bypass the only elected board in the state with the sole duty of overseeing K-12 education.

Can you say, “I’ll take my ball and go home?”

Yep, once again the legislature is implying that they know more about how to run education better than educators do. As always, ironies abound. One being that each state school board member represents far more constituents than either a House member or a Senator, but the legislature discounts the votes of these constituents.

Another being that the original charter bill says the state board must complete their task by June 1, 2015. Yet before this deadline arrives, the Chairperson of the House Education Policy committee has decided that the original bill was flawed.

State Superintendent Dr. Tommy Bice is fond of saying that the only real problems in education do not come from the students–but from the grownups.